Howdy, Stranger!

Vanilla was born out of the desire to create flexible, customizable, and downright entertaining community solutions. Vanilla has been used to power tens of thousands of community forums around the world and we couldn’t be happier if you’ve decided to use Vanilla to grow yours.

Forum	Rich Editor	Dashboard

Every community is unique. Vanilla is a finely-crafted platform on which designers and developers can build a custom-tailored environment that meets your community’s particular needs.

5 reasons Vanilla is the sweetest forum

1. We’ve reimagined traditional forums for mass-appeal.
2. Our theming flexibility is second-to-none.
3. Impossibly good integration options with single sign-ons and embedding.
4. The best tools available for community management.
5. Curated features with great plugin options, not the kitchen sink.

Installation

The current version of Vanilla requires PHP 7.2+ and MySQL 5.7+. The following PHP extensions are also required: cURL, DOM, Fileinfo, GD, intl, JSON, libxml, PDO

• Local Installation
• Our Cloud Hosting Solution
• The Basics of Self Hosting

Upgrading from an earlier version of Vanilla? See our upgrade notes.

Changes to Fulltext Indexing

Full-text index support has been disabled by default as of Vanilla 4. To enable full-text index support, add a FullTextIndexing key under the Database section of your site config and set its value to true. Failure to add this config value will result in full-text indexes being removed from Vanilla’s database tables.

Contributing

• Local Development - Environment, Configuration & Debugging & Build Tools.
• Running Unit tests.
• Coding Standard - PHP, Typescript, Database Naming
• Writing Pull Requests
• Contributing Guidelines
• Contributing to Translations

Getting Help

• Troubleshooting upgrades & installs
• Official documentation
• Vanilla community forums
• Official cloud hosting with professional support & migration services
• File a detailed bug report
• Plan out a new feature

Reporting Security Issues

Please disclose security issues responsibly by emailing support@vanillaforums.com with a full description or join our bug bounty program. We cannot award bounties outside that program.

We’ll work on releasing an updated version as quickly as possible. Please do not email non-security issues; use the issue tracker instead.

Building Releases

Vanilla releases are built using Phing to create a pre-built deploy-ready copies of Vanilla. To build these run the following in the root of the repository.

./bin/release

The following dependenies are all required for building a release.

• node
• yarn
• php
• composer

License & Legal Stuff

Vanilla is free, open source software distributed under the license gpl-2.0-only. We accept and encourage contributions from our community and sometimes give hugs in return.

Copyright © 2009-2022 Vanilla Forums Inc.

Vanilla Forums is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Vanilla Forums is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Vanilla Forums.

If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. Contact Vanilla Forums Inc. at support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com

Bonk!

Just kidding, everything’s awesome.